ElliPro: a new structure-based tool for the prediction of antibody epitopes

Background: Reliable prediction of antibody, or B-cell, epitopes remains challenging yet highly desirable for the design of vaccines and immunodiagnostics. A correlation between antigenicity, solvent accessibility, and flexibility in proteins was demonstrated. Subsequently, Thornton and colleagues proposed a method for identifying continuous epitopes in the protein regions protruding from the protein's globular surface. The aim of this work was to implement that method as a webtool and evaluate its performance on discontinuous epitopes known from the structures of antibody-protein complexes. Results: Here we present ElliPro, a web-tool that implements Thornton's method and, together with a residue clustering algorithm, the MODELLER program and the Jmol viewer, allows the prediction and visualization of antibody epitopes in a given protein sequence or structure. ElliPro has been tested on a benchmark dataset of discontinuous epitopes inferred from 3D structures of antibody-pr...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2008
• Where: BMCBI
• Authors: Julia V. Ponomarenko, Huynh-Hoa Bui, Wei Li, Nicholas Fusseder, Philip E. Bourne, Alessandro Sette, Björn Peters
• Keywords: BMCBI 2008, Epitopes, Predictions, Protein